Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics; Robotics Simulation

Position: Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Robotics Simulation)
Overview

Microsoft's Discovery and Quantum (MDQ) division develops and delivers advanced artificial intelligence (AI), cloud-enabled capabilities, and strategic technologies to help solve the world's major challenges. From accelerating scientific discovery with advanced AI tools, to pioneering breakthroughs in quantum computing, to advancing robotics and AI capabilities that drive real-world impact, joining MDQ means building the future, partnering with fast-moving innovators, and operating in a high-impact, mission-driven environment.

At Microsoft Robotics within MDQ, we build and deploy technologies that enable people, robots, and AI agents to collaborate and achieve more.

We are building Microsoft's platform for physical intelligence-an integrated robotics software and AI platform that brings together humans, robots, and agents through robotics AI models, innovative teaming solutions and experiences, physically grounded agentic AI workflows, trustworthy test and evaluation, and real-world customer-focused validation. Built on Microsoft's core platforms and delivered through and with a global ecosystem of partners and customers, this platform accelerates AI for the physical world and helps robotics solutions move from experimentation to reliable, scaled deployment.

We are hiring a Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft Robotics (Robotics Simulation) at the Senior level, to lead the design, integration, and analysis of physics-based simulation frameworks that underpin robotics development, testing, and AI model training across Microsoft's robotics platform. This engineer will architect and optimize high-fidelity simulation environments that accurately model robot kinematics, dynamics, sensors, actuators, and contact physics, enabling reinforcement learning training, closed-loop policy evaluation, synthetic data generation, and sim-to-real transfer.

The role bridges advanced physics simulation, robotics autonomy stacks, and large-scale ML infrastructure to accelerate the development and deployment of physically grounded AI.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

#Microsoft Robotics #MDQ

Responsibilities

* Design, develop, and maintain physics-based simulation frameworks for robotics applications, including accurate modeling of rigid-body dynamics, articulated mechanisms, contact and friction, deformable objects, and fluid interactions as required by target robot platforms.

* Implement essential robotics simulation features, including accurate sensor models (cameras, LiDAR, IMUs, force/torque sensors, tactile arrays), actuator models, controller interfaces, and communication protocols that mirror real robot hardware behavior.

* Build real-to-sim and sim-to-real workflows for dynamic environments and robotics tasks, implementing domain randomization, system identification, and physics parameter tuning to minimize sim-to-real gaps.

* Create and maintain asset tool chains supporting industry-standard formats (USD, URDF, MJCF, SDF) and integrate with 3D content pipelines for environment and robot model ingestion.

* Develop simulation infrastructure for robust autonomy test and evaluation, enabling the use of rigorous test methods and design of experiments for validation and verification-based of robotics technologies and algorithms.

* Develop simulation infrastructure for robot learning policies, including reinforcement learning training at scale, with parallelized environment instances, reward instrumentation, curriculum management, and integration with distributed ML training frameworks.

* Collaborate closely with robotics engineers, ML researchers, and platform engineers to enable large-scale robotics development, training pipelines, benchmarking suites, and automated evaluation workflows.

* Lead architectural decisions for simulation platform selection, customization, and…